The Little Mermaid Is A Slow-Motion Shipwreck

Disney's The Little Mermaid Is A Slow-Motion Shipwreck

This is #CineFile, where our critic Rahul Desai goes beyond the obvious takes, to dissect movies and shows that are in the news. Today: The Little Mermaid (2023).

Dir: Rob Marshall

Cast: Halle Bailey

Playing in: Theatres

I REMEMBER sitting through Disney's live-action adaptation of The Lion King and thinking: But why? I've never really understood this business of taking old animated classics and turning them into soulless VFX "Look what we can do now!" showcases. It's like storytelling hasn't evolved, so the only thing left is to flaunt the evolution of filmmaking. The novelty of watching those wonderful hand-drawn 'cartoons' was exactly that: The animation. The magic of fantastical worlds and creatures behaving like humans was rooted in the storybook-styled images and free-spirited fairytales.

I don't get the point of making the same stuff look more…real. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Who is the target audience? Won't kids today have already seen the famous animated versions? Won't the nostalgic 1990s kids prefer those versions, too? At times, I get enraged that film directors just don't know where to draw the line with technology. Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be done. And if you're going to show off anyway, why not do a James Cameron? Why not create something entirely original so that, for once, the technology is actually the key to the storytelling?

I went through all these strong emotions parading as questions — this endless spiral of rage and resentment — while watching Rob Marshall's The Little Mermaid, the blasphemous and joyless live-action remake of the 1989 musical film. That is, when I wasn't falling asleep during its bloated 135-minute runtime.

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In Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster Mines Despair For Horror — & Comedy

A 49-year-old virgin (Joaquin Phoenix) is forced to battle his crippling anxieties and confront his repressed trauma on a journey home to meet his mom. Prahlad Srihari reviews.

Dir: Ari Aster

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix

Playing in: Theatres

ARI ASTER’s third film Beau Is Afraid is a surrealist rendition of the old Freudian slip joke about saying one thing but meaning your mother. Put simply, it is not an out-and-out horror film like the American writer-director’s first two outings, but a comedy. A broad and unwholesome comedy about existential tail-chasing as a chronically anxious 49-year-old virgin (Joaquin Phoenix) is forced to battle through his crippling anxieties and confront his repressed trauma on the journey home to meet his mom.

Sitting through 178 minutes of Joaquin Phoenix besieged by deranged vagrants, homicidal war veterans and a giant penis is like circuit training for the nerves. The film operates in a tragicomic register entirely its own. Anxiety triggers are used as conceptual scaffolding onto which comical situations of sheer cinematic lunacy are built. Aster brings audiences to the threshold of a nightmare and undercuts its horror with humour. You may cringe. Your patience may be tested. But you will find yourself thinking about it — for it is an experience that is difficult to shake — so much so that it will redraw your comedic boundaries.

As the title announces, Beau is afraid. Of just about everything. His response to any threat, real or imagined, is to flinch, crouch, shake, wail, puke or run away. The only place he feels safe is alone in the figurative womb that is his run-down Manhattan apartment. Coming home from therapy or going out for a bottle of water is staged like navigating the frontline of a warzone. Every fear of this deeply paranoid man-child caught in a sustained flight-freeze-fawn response transmutes into hostile forces.

On every corner, a threat lies in wait: criminals, junkies and hobos run riot on streets; news reports speak of a butt-naked serial killer piling up a body count; garbage rots and burns; a kiosk offers “guns aplenty”; graffitied walls call for the death of children. Beau’s fears, in all their grotesque hybridity, warp society into a veritable dystopia. All this unfolds like a fever dream catalogued after passing out and waking up. Watching it in a theatre is advised because we are forced to surrender to Aster’s dizzying fantasia without the luxury of pausing.

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